Okay, so now I feel stupid. A week ago, I was stressing out about how few tickets had been sold for the world premiere of my play Kill the Critic!
I shouldn't have. As I discovered with my reading of The Butler Did It!, 95% of the audience waited until the last few days before the performance to order tickets, and almost 50% bought at the door.
We ended up with a huge turnout: 105 on Friday night, 25 on Saturday afternoon and 108 on Saturday night. In fact, so many people streamed in for that final performance that I was still scrambling to set out chairs after the play had started.
Even better, the show was a monster-sized hit. The audiences ate it up, laughing uproariously in all the right places and in a bunch more I never intended to be funny.
But the best part of the evening were the people. One of the reasons I love theatre so much is that it brings people of such varying backgrounds together, and this production in particular enabled me to connect with old and new friends alike.
My editor at Pioneer, Brian D. Taylor, drove down from Denver to see the show. Although we email each other frequently, I had never met him before, so it was nice to be able to chat face to face. And, great guy that he is, he even gave the play a fabulous review.
Also, a couple who were the first friends my wife and I made when we moved to Colorado were there. We haven't seen them for probably, oh, 18 years. Sure, we could have met for dinner or drinks over the years, but we didn't. Instead, it took a play--and a pretty silly play at that--to bring us together.
And then there was the entire contingent from my day job (believe it or not, I'm an electrical engineer for a semiconductor company). I have no idea how most of them had heard about the play, but there they were on Saturday night, laughing and cheering as much as the rest of the audience.
Life is good. Theatre is even better.
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